Week 4 of the program brought the contrast between the buzzing, fast-paced city of Chicago and the quiet rural town of Arthur, Ill. Special highlights were the visits to two private homes and getting a taste of the variety of American life – in the case of the ALTRUSA dinner in a literal sense (a big thank you to our hosts)!

June 12th: The visit to the Teen Lab at Urbana Free Library left a deep impression – not only the personal engagement of the teen librarians with their patrons, but the mere fact that they are setting up and packing up the space every day is a great example for creative pragmatism!

June 13th: After a comfortable train ride we hit the “Windy City” and met Liz Aviles – a librarian now Senior Vice President at Strategy and Cultural Affairs at Upshot Agency, a marketing company. It was a glimpse in a world quite different from the average library job but according to Liz librarians with their curiosity and pattern seeking behavior have a knack for discovering trends and do future reading.

June 14th: The visit to the Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago was the first time I could see stacks operated fully automatically. This was of special interest to me because we are contemplating such a system at my library.

June 15th: Our visit to the Campus Instructional Facility was another “space experience” – one would not think that a tour through a classroom building could be so interesting!

June 16th: The visit to the Amish home and the encounter with its owner Julie was my personal highlight of the week – creative management of innovation and change while sticking to one’s values could be observed here! The result like solar-powered washing machines and lamps seem very reasonable inventions, not only for Amish people.

June 19th: Juneteenth – a national holiday in the US commemorating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans and sparking the memory of our visit to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., where a copy of the declaration with Lincoln’s signature is kept. But we had to do a little work despite the holiday, learning more about Artificial Intelligence, certainly the big subject to deal now not only in libraries and working on an action plan for the time after our return to our home libraries. My project has been inspired by the presentation of MJ Han, Head of Acquisitions and Cataloging Services at the University of Illinois Library – developing a Metadata Maker to facilitate the creation of metadata would also be an asset in my library.

June 20th: Evaluation and graduation day, a time to celebrate and to be happy about all the experiences and encounters of the past 4 weeks!

